UPDATE: David Horowitz says he wrote that “renegade” headline

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is an update to this previous post of mine.

I didn’t intend to spend my blogging hours today writing about David Horowitz vs. Bill Kristol—and so, apologies for this narrow focus. I actually had other things in mind, and I expect to get around to them tomorrow. But this particular brouhaha got my goat, because it’s an example of the sort of rhetoric I see so often, deplore, and basically can do very little about.

Sigh.]

David Horowitz has now made it crystal (pun intended) clear that he is responsible for the word “renegade” in the title of his piece critical of Bill Kristol. And Horowitz is not the least bit apologetic about it:

To answer one oft-repeated question, I did write the headline with the “Renegade Jew” phrase and Breitbart chose to run it as-is. Some illiterate anti-Semites have picked up on the phrase without understanding it. Some neo-conservatives have called me names as well, displaying their own brand of inarticulate hate without bothering to respond to the actual argument of my piece.

So to clarify: I understand that a lot of conservatives are still skeptical about Donald Trump as the Republican nominee. I respect their skepticism when it is attached to reasonable arguments, since no candidate is perfect and no one can know the future…

But the primaries are over and Donald Trump is now the nominee. That means he is the only obstacle to the party of Obama and Hillary and Huma Abedin, of the Iran deal and the appeasement of Islamic Jew-hatred beginning with the Hamas terrorists of Gaza and the Fatah terrorists of the West Bank…

Splitting the Republican vote and electing Hillary is a betrayal of the Jews in an hour in which their backs are to the wall. Hence the designation renegade for those who are planning a third-party run, and for which I make no apologies.

Where to begin?

First of all—although I’m pretty certain David Horowitz does not read my blog and is not referring to me—quite a bit of the criticism of Horowitz’s article was not inarticulate and did not involve name-calling. Nor were those anti-Kristol readers who reacted to the article with anti-Semitism “illiterate,” for the most part. Horowitz seems to be failing to understand (or at least to acknowledge) the very real objections a person might have to his article, as well as the effect a headline like that would inevitably have on the significant segment of Trump supporters and Breitbart readers who are only too happy to post anti-Semitic comments, and that his headline would inevitably act as a releaser for the latter.

What’s more (as I pointed out in my first post on the subject), one of the problems with Horowitz’s critique of Kristol is that Kristol is trying to find a candidate that will act not as a mere spoiler, but who might actually have a chance of a win. Kristol has said as much:

We could get on almost every ballot, Texas passed yesterday, North Carolina is this month, almost every other state is June 27… You could get on the ballot with the right money and organization. Anderson got on all the ballots in 1980, Perot in 1992. Could you win? If you could have an attractive candidate who could get on the debate stage in October — which would mean you’d have to be at 10-15% at that time. And then you get on the debate; Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and let’s say Ben Sasse… Attractive 44 year-old senator from Nebraska… Could a lot of Americans say, whoa, we can do a lot better than Clinton or Trump, I think it is possible…

Obviously if it were easy independents would be running every four years, I think it is possible.

This year, with two remarkably disliked candidates from both major parties, it is particularly possible.

But the Horowitz article treats it as impossible. However, I can easily imagine that a lot of votes that would otherwise go to Hillary might go to this third-party candidate, a possibility Horowitz does not acknowledge. Dissatisfaction with Clinton is nearly as high as dissatisfaction with Trump, and I personally know a lot of people on right AND left who would dearly love to have a viable alternative to both.

What’s more, if we’re going to evaluate the two candidates on their Israeli stances only (one focus of Horowitz’s argument), it’s not really clear who is more pro-Israel. Take a look at articles on the subject; there’s a lot of disagreement there. And of course, both candidates are not known for keeping their word, so there’s that consideration as well. If you want to read some articles that allege Trump would not be good for Israel, there’s this from an Israeli paper that leans left, and this from Commentary (on the right). That last article cites two statements Trump made on the campaign trail that cast doubt on what his attitude towards Israel really is or will be:

Though Trump’s foreign policy statements are generally all over the map as he improvises positions that are, at one and the same time, extremely aggressive (his threats to kick ISIS’s ass) and neo-isolationist (pull back from war on Islamist terror while conducting trade wars), he has been consistent about his stance on the peace process. There he has repeatedly vowed that he would be “neutral” with regards to Israel and the Palestinians. He also expressed doubts about whether Israel was ready to take risks for peace.

Such a position makes Trump an outlier among Republicans. Virtually every other GOP presidential candidate and the overwhelming majority of Republicans in the House and the Senate have affirmed their support for Israel in a way that makes clear that they believe the U.S. strongly backs Israel against the repeated Palestinian refusal to make peace. If anything, Trump’s stance strongly resembles the policy position taken by the Obama administration over the last 7+years.

I’m not writing this post to solve the question of who would be better for Israel, Clinton or Trump. My point here is that it is disingenuous of Horowitz to claim that it is a settled question and that the answer is indisputably that Trump would be good and Hillary bad for Israel, and that any Jew who would support a third-party candidate instead of Trump is a “renegade” betrayer of Israel.

Note also that the headline of Horowitz’s piece doesn’t call Kristol a “renegade” Republican, its says “Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew,” and so let’s look at that last sentence of Horowitz’s follow-up piece (not the original) in light of that:

Splitting the Republican vote and electing Hillary is a betrayal of the Jews in an hour in which their backs are to the wall. Hence the designation renegade for those who are planning a third-party run, and for which I make no apologies.

As I’ve said above, Kristol thinks it very possible that a third-party candidate could win, so he does not see himself as on a path to “electing Hillary.” I’ve also just pointed out that it’s not a foregone conclusion that Trump’s election would be better for Israel anyway. But in addition, if you focus on the title of Horowitz’s original piece plus those two sentences from his follow-up piece that I just quoted, there’s a further problem. Horowitz is not merely attacking “those who are planning a third-party run” as betrayers of the Republican Party and of Israel—he is attacking Kristol specifically as a Jewish betrayer. What’s more, in the article’s title it is unclear whether the Jew Kristol has betrayed Israel or the Republican Party. In fact, since the words “Renegade Jew” are preceded by the words “Republican Spoiler,” a reader might easily and rationally conclude from the headline that what Horowitz means to say is that Kristol is a Jew who has betrayed Republicans and their nominee Trump, not a Jew who has betrayed Israel. That certainly seems to be the way a lot of the anti-Semitic readers at Breitbart took it, and there’s nothing “illiterate” about their doing so.

One more thing before I get off this particular horse. In Horowitz’s original article, he gives the following example of what he considers to be a poor reason Kristol has given for not supporting Trump:

In addition to alleging that Trump is lacking in principles and character, Kristol claims that the Republican candidate is a crackpot conspiracy theorist, a disqualifying trait. Kristol’s evidence is a remark Trump made on the eve of the Indiana primary suggesting that Ted Cruz’s father might have something to hide about his alleged acquaintance with Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald…

…Comments Kristol: “What’s horrible is a leading presidential candidate trading in crackpot conspiracy theories.”

So it might be if Trump were actually putting forward a conspiracy theory.

But what we have here, obviously, is not a theory but some Trumpian campaign mischief – not dissimilar in form to his earlier suggestion that because Ted Cruz was born in Canada he might not be able to actually run for president even if he were to win the nomination. These were both campaign tricks ”“ dirty tricks if you like ”“ to throw a rival off balance and gain an advantage.

Nice to know that Horowitz can read Trump’s mind, and that “obviously” Trump is not putting forth a conspiracy theory and is not a conspiracy theorist. But again, Horowitz is ignoring Trump’s history. The Cruz-father claim was hardly the only conspiracy theory Trump has promoted—and most tellingly, some of these theories were not just in the context of an election. Trump actually has been a conspiracy theorist for a long time, on several topics.

For example, in the beginning of the Trump candidacy I wrote about Trump’s “Bush lied” “Bush is evil” attacks that long predated his candidacy this year. Thus, they were not “Trumpian campaign mischief,” they appear to have been deeply held beliefs of a longstanding nature (not that mere “campaign mischief” would excuse a slander of that magnitude anyway). I documented the history of Trump’s conspiracy theorist accusations against Bush here if you want to see how many times Trump said this, beginning way back in 2008. Horowitz treats the topic of Trump and conspiracy theories as though it was limited to the recent accusations about Cruz’s father, which it most definitely was not.

And these things were not said by aides or operatives or PACs, they were straight from Trump’s own mouth. But there were other topics, too, on which Trump has been—if not inclined to conspiracy theories—then certainly eager to embrace wacky and dangerously unscientific ones, such as the autism/vaccine link, which he not only mentioned during this campaign year but which he seems to have believed in for many years.

I could go on, but it probably doesn’t matter. These verbal wars will go on, too, and a lot more people will read the accusations than will take the trouble to look into the facts.

“Renegade”: Breitbart continues its fall…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and slides right into the mainstreaming of subtle (and maybe not even so subtle) anti-Semitism.

David Horowitz wrote an article on Breitbart criticizing Bill Kristol for his nevertrumperism, and Breitbart titled it “Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew.” Two things to note. The first is that this was not necessarily (or even probably?) David Horowitz’s choice for a title, because it’s not usually the writer who chooses the title, it’s the editors, and the text of Horowitz’s article—though certainly critical of Kristol—doesn’t contain very much that would support the “renegade Jew” appellation. So although we really don’t know how involved Horowitz was in the title if at all, we certainly know that some editor or editors at Breitbart were. However, the Breitbart article has been republished at Horowitz’s own site, complete with title and no disclaimer, so it is safe to say that Horowitz certainly has not distanced himself from it.

The second thing to note is that if you look at the comments to the Breitbart piece, just a quick perusal will tell you how the title managed to unleash a gush of anti-Semitism. It doesn’t take much, really, and in this case some of the most rabid Trump supporters who hang out on Breitbart can easily combine their hatred and need to destroy anyone who would dare defy Trump with a latent (and sometimes not-so-latent) anti-Semitism.

None of this is an accusation that Trump himself is anti-Semitic, by the way. I actually don’t think he is. But I can safely say that some of his alt-right promoters and their followers are.

If you Google the word “renegade” you’ll find the following definition and synonyms:

noun
a person who deserts and betrays an organization, country, or set of principles.
synonyms: traitor, defector, deserter, turncoat, rebel, mutineer…

adjective
having treacherously changed allegiance…
synonyms: treacherous, traitorous, disloyal, treasonous, rebel, mutinous

Strong, strong word. And somewhat ironic, since Horowitz himself is a neocon (political changer, that is, from radical left to right, and who I’ve written about before on this blog) extraordinaire. Kristol, as the son of neocon elder statesman Irving Kristol (now deceased), was born into conservatism and as far as I know has been a conservative his whole life.

In the case of Trump support or non-support (and for the record, I am sympathetic to both sides at this point, now that Trump is almost certainly going to be Hillary Clinton’s opponent), Kristol has been against Trump from the start and very clear about it, and he’s searching for a possible third-party alternative he believes might actually be a viable candidate, not supporting Hillary Clinton.

This Slate piece pretty much sums up the oh-so-clever game that Breitbart (the site—not the man, who is deceased and cannot comment) is playing here:

In [the article]…Horowitz rails against Kristol and “a small but well-heeled group of Washington insiders” who are hoping to arrange a conservative third-party candidacy. A paragraph seemingly tacked on at the end accuses Kristol of putting world Jewry in danger by potentially splitting the Republican vote and empowering Democrats who are soft on radical Islam. It’s enough, perhaps, to give Breitbart plausible deniability [for the title]; the site can claim it’s calling out Kristol on behalf of Jews, rather than calling him out as a Jew.

Really, though, what Breitbart is doing here is playing a double game, covering anti-Semitism with a tacky sheen of philo-Semitism. To define someone as a “Renegade Jew” in a column about scheming elites written for an audience full of white nationalists is to signal to the sewers. The comments under the piece suggest that Breitbart’s readers got the message.

At present, as I write these words, there are 5360 comments to the Horowitz piece at Breitbart. I’m certainly not going to read them all, or even most of them. But I did skim quite a few and there is no doubt that although a great many are of the “we hate elitists like Kristol who would oppose Trump” type, quite a few are specifically in the anti-Jewish category. One example of the latter:

Trump rose up against the Jewish media and Jewish Hollywood and Jewsih power. HE is almost defined by his defiance of it. From Bill Kristol to Ben Shapiro to Bill Maher to Murdoch. They all hate and wil always hate Trump. Most are biding their time but soon very soon the back stabbing begins.

Here’s a comment to the Breitbart article that analyzes the phenomenon (although the commenter appears to think that Hororwitz himself wrote the headline—which, as I already said, is not necessarily correct):

I think most of the anti-semitic [comments at Breitbart] are real–but it’s less of a reflection on Trump supporters than it is on subset of Breitbart readers who are Trump supporters. Just read the comments in stories unrelated to Trump where a central figure (especially a liberal one) is Jewish. Unfortunately Horowitz [or Breitbart, or a combination of the two] opened up the floodgates here by playing the Jew card…

I expect that these floodgates will remain open.

This “renegade Jew” stuff is also a subset of another phenomenon we will see escalating with Trump’s candidacy and which is very familiar from Obama’s presidency and from politics in general, one that the mainstream media has long employed against Republican candidates running against their favored Democrats: that these opponents or critics are not just people who disagree, they are enemies whose reputations are to be destroyed.

[ADDENDUM: An update to this post can be found here.]

The last leaf on the 1800s tree

The New Neo Posted on by

There is only one person alive who was born before 1900, and she is Emma Morano of Italy.

My grandmother was born in the 1880s, and when I was a child I knew plenty of people from that century. Now there’s just one, who said yesterday—on learning that the torch had been passed to her with the death of the only other 1800s survivor: “My word, I’m as old as the hills.”

Articles about very old people always emphasize their life habits that may or may not have contributed to their longevity. My guess is that it’s mostly heredity. But for those who want to follow in her footsteps, Morano goes to bed early and gets up before dawn, and has eaten two eggs a day (one raw, one cooked) since the age of twenty. Good luck with that.

[NOTE: If you’re wondering about the title of this post, it’s from a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes that I discussed at length here along with the phenomenon of an entire generation slowly dying out.]

Crater Lake, crater lakes

The New Neo Posted on by

I recently went on a trip to Crater Lake in Oregon. I’ve been there before, and each time I’ve been impressed by its transcendent beauty and other-worldliness, and fascinated by its history.

The lake, in case you don’t know, is not only the deepest in the US, but of unusual clarity even for lakes of this type (which tend to be clear because they are not fed by streams). Here’s a photo I took of it:

CraterLakeLavaButte2016 021

One of the most fascinating aspects of Crater Lake is that it was formed about 7,700 years ago after an ancestral mountain (Mazama) experienced such a massive explosion of its innards that its outer shell could not support its own weight and collapsed, probably within a few hours or at most a couple of days. The natives of the area probably witnessed the spectacular sight of a mountain the size of present-day Rainier suddenly disappearing. No wonder they retain legends of an epic battle between a sky god and a god of the underworld, a struggle that destroyed the mountain and created the lake.

Volcanoes fascinate me, and caldera lakes (the proper technical term) are one of their loveliest and most mysterious manifestations, even if the mountain is gone (or never was; some caldera lakes result from eruptions of fairly low shield volcanoes).

Crater Lake’s setting and blueness makes it especially beautiful. But lakes of this kind are often extremely picturesque, as evidence by many websites that specialize in photos of them. I was stunned to discover there is even one in Germany, formed by a volcanic explosion 12,900 years ago. These days it looks tamed and domesticated:

laacherSee

Very different from many of its wilder cousins:

deriba

kerid

Kelimutu

The largest lake of this kind is Lake Toba in Indonesia. Ever hear of it? I hadn’t either, till now. It’s the remnant from a supervolcano that erupted some time between 69,000 and 77,000 years ago, and is thought to have been the “largest known explosive eruption on Earth in the last 25 million years.” That’s formidable.

And here it is:

toba

The setting and color is not as spectacular as Crater Lake, but the size sure eclipses it. Toba is 62 by 19 miles, whereas Crater Lake is a mere 6 by 5 miles, although somewhat deeper.

Restoring local control of education

The New Neo Posted on by

David French suggests that rejecting federal funding is the remedy if states wish to reclaim their right to be free of executive actions such as the Obama administration’s directive on school bathrooms [emphasis mine]:

Without an act of Congress, without a ruling from the Supreme Court, and without even going through the motions of the regulatory rule-making process, the administration issued a letter drafting every single public educational institution in the country to implement the extreme edge of the sexual revolution…

…We must fix our education system or slowly but surely lose our culture. Indeed, virtually every other conservative endeavor ”” whether it’s winning elections, transforming media, or infiltrating pop culture ”” will fail if the entire edifice of public education is arrayed against us. The system, however, can’t be reformed from within: It’s stacked top-to-bottom with progressive activists even in red states.

States should consider rejecting federal education funding entirely (Texas is considering doing just that). At the very least, charter schools should be completely disentangled ”” and not just from public employees’ unions but also from federal funds (in order to insulate them from federal influence); voucher systems should be dramatically expanded ”” giving every family the option to spend their share of tax dollars at the school of their choice; and private institutions and philanthropists should step up to provide needed funding. Indeed, private citizens don’t have to wait for government reform. Scholarship funds can expand the ranks of tuition-paying private-school students immediately, and coalitions of churches can provide substantial support for their communities’ best private schools.

When I wrote about the directive yesterday, I said (half tongue-in-cheek): “I sometimes wonder whether Obama is trying to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s chances of getting elected.” I don’t really think Obama wants to do that. I believe that he thinks the position of the left is strong enough that he can go forward—as he has so many times before—against the will of the American people, and the right will not be able or willing to undo it.

But why couldn’t a President Trump just simply reverse the order? Let’s ignore for the moment whether Trump would even want to, considering his mixed messages on the subject of transgender bathrooms in schools; let’s just assume for the sake of argument that he would indeed like to do undo it. That would seem an easy thing to do, wouldn’t it? A president could just issue another directive undoing Obama’s.

Well, that ignores a couple of things. The first is that this policy will have been in place for about a half year. Schools might be afraid to switch back and provoke lawsuits. But the other is that the way the letter was worded, it’s not actually an executive order straight from Obama. It was issued by the Departments of Justice and Education (the Civil Rights Division and the Office for Civil Rights, respectively).

Trump has said that he plans to reduce (or even dismantle) the Department of Education and return its functions to the local governments. That is something I happen to agree with as a step in the right direction (and Ted Cruz was extremely strong on this issue, as you can see from this). But the real power behind the Obama administration’s recent directive on school bathrooms (and much else that this administration has done) is the DOJ, and the letter frames the new policy as a civil rights issue (sex discrimination) under Title IX.

Which brings us to an important influence this administration has had on the DOJ: Obama has been conducting his own Gramscian march through that institution. As J. Christian Adams has been chronicling for quite some time, this administration has been busy transforming the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division into a leftist activist group:

In 2011, we produced the Every Single One series for PJ Media about an unprecedented wave of ideological hiring of leftist attorneys into the career ranks of the Justice Department. The series documented the partisan and radical background of every single one of the 113 new Justice Department lawyers hired into the Obama Civil Rights Division from January 2009 to January 2011…

With the help of PJ Media, we will now be updating that revealing report…Because we have obtained all of the resumes of the attorney hires in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice since then.

And once again, every single one of them has an intensely ideological background…

…the Obama Justice Department has assembled a law firm of hundreds of fringe leftists to enforce a brave new vision of civil rights law.

Why the Civil Rights Division? Simple — it may be one of the most powerful components of the entire federal government. If a president wanted to “fundamentally transform” the nation, he would likely start with the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.

The tentacles of the Division reach into virtually every crevice of American life. Federal statutes, under the banner of protecting civil rights, reach home lending, football stadium and theater seating, voting, elections, education, college admissions, apartment rentals, prisons, hiring practices, the use of English, special education programs, religious liberty, abortion clinic protests, arrests, law enforcement, voter rolls, insane asylums, state and local government hiring, swimming pool lift chairs, bathtub design, Spanish language ballots, school discipline, and even if boys can dress in drag in high school…

If a president wanted to transform a nation, he would unleash hundreds of crusading leftist lawyers who hold views far outside of the American mainstream and give them power to push the frontiers.

This is the crux of the matter, and it’s important information about which the vast majority of Americans are unaware. Could a Republican president reverse this trend?

Not easily. But if that Republican president were determined and knowledgeable, the following approach might help:

Many may have…assumed a new president can just snap his or her fingers in January 2017 and make it all go away. But alas, no. Most of the lawyers we featured in 2011 are embedded career civil servants and cannot be removed because of the restrictions of a merit protection system 100 years out of date.

…[But an] incoming president can also reassign Senior Executive Service staff to other areas of the Justice Department (or other executive agencies), and even far outside of Washington, D.C., where they can no longer engage in the political mischief and obstructionism that is their raison d’etre.

Importantly, many of the most recent hires we will name are still within their probationary periods as federal employees. When a new president takes the oath of office in January 2017, some of these lawyers will still not have vested.

Ted Cruz would have been just the person to accomplish this sort of thing, but that’s not going to happen (unless Trump is elected and appoints him AG). I have no idea whether Trump would have DOJ reform as a priority, and if so whether he would be able to appoint people knowledgeable enough to implement it. But one reason I have been reluctantly considering voting for him (despite my mammoth reservations about other aspects of his character and plans) is this issue, as well as others connected with SCOTUS appointments and of course illegal immigration. I have very little doubt that Hillary Clinton would either continue the Obama leftist hires (most likely), or at the very least would do nothing to disturb the agenda of the people who are now in place.

As I said in my post yesterday, I think that this directive of the Obama administration on transgender students in public school bathrooms is likely to anger a lot of people (even many liberal Democrats) about federal government intrusion into local control of education. The GOP has the opportunity to exploit that anger and emphasize that they favor localities regaining the upper hand in decisions involving the education of children. Whether it be Trump or other down-ticket GOP candidates, this is an issue that I think could resonate, and it is not tied to specific things such as what bathrooms transgender students will use or the curriculum of Common Core. It has to do with whether the federal government will further take over an important societal function—the education of children—that has traditionally been something over which parents and communities have wanted to exercise a great deal of control.

Treating chronic pain without addiction

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an article on a topic that interests me greatly, having been a sufferer from chronic pain of a moderate to severe nature for many years, particularly from 1990 to around 2004.

So you can bet I have a lot of strong opinions on it. One of these days I’ll write a longer post on the subject, but that day is not today (too busy!). I thought it might be a good topic for discussion in the comments section, so feel free.

Did Trump pretend to be his own spokesperson in the 1990’s?

The New Neo Posted on by

This story is so bizarre I don’t know what to make of it—both the original story and the current Trump denial after supposed earlier admissions.

I’m not even going to try to wade through it at the moment, but there are tons of links there if you care to delve into it and come to your own conclusions. Here’s Allahpundit’s in-depth take on the matter.

Fun times, fun times.

The Obama administration has decided to meddle in school toilets

The New Neo Posted on by

And so he—that is, his Departments of Justice and Education—have issued this letter of “guidance.”

I sometimes wonder whether Obama is trying to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s chances of getting elected. Because I think that this “decree” is the sort of thing likely to anger a lot of people, even many liberal Democrats:

The Obama administration is planning to issue a sweeping directive telling every public school district in the country to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms that match their gender identity.

A letter to school districts will go out Friday, adding to a highly charged debate over transgender rights in the middle of the administration’s legal fight with North Carolina over the issue. The declaration ”” signed by Justice and Education department officials ”” will describe what schools should do to ensure that none of their students are discriminated against.

It does not have the force of law, but it contains an implicit threat: Schools that do not abide by the Obama administration’s interpretation of the law could face lawsuits or a loss of federal aid.

A great many schools have been already allowing transgender students to use the facilities of that person’s self-identified gender, but this has been mainly done through decisions made at the local level. I don’t think there are all that many parents—even liberal ones—who will be very happy at the Obama administration’s letter, and the Times comments section bears this out, with plenty of people saying the equivalent of “I’m a liberal, but this makes me mighty uneasy.”

Obama’s reaction: tough. Your discomfort, or that of your child, is quite irrelevant:

“A school may not require transgender students to use facilities inconsistent with their gender identity or to use individual-user facilities when other students are not required to do so,” according to the letter [from the administration], a copy of which was provided to the New York Times. A school’s obligation under federal law “to ensure nondiscrimination on the basis of sex requires schools to provide transgender students equal access to educational programs and activities even in circumstances in which other students, parents, or community members raise objections or concerns,” the letter states. “As is consistently recognized in civil rights cases, the desire to accommodate others’ discomfort cannot justify a policy that singles out and disadvantages a particular class of students.”

As soon as a child’s parent or legal guardian asserts a gender identity for the student that “differs from previous representations or records,” the letter says, the child is to be treated accordingly ”” without any requirement for a medical diagnosis or birth certificate to be produced.

In this case—as in so many others—the process by which Obama is trying to do this is very problematic. Under what authority is the federal government interfering with school rules about bathrooms? Obama’s argument is that it’s a civil rights issue and therefore not a local issue:

Under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, schools receiving federal money may not discriminate based on a student’s sex, including a student’s transgender status. The guidance makes clear that both federal agencies treat a student’s gender identity as the student’s sex for purposes of enforcing Title IX.

Would the courts, including the Supreme Court, actually enforce this in the particular way envisioned here? I don’t think it’s at all clear that this comes under the banner of discrimination by sex as it is usually defined, because it applies equally to transgender boys and transgender girls. That wouldn’t stop the highest court from saying it does, however, but the proper way to approach it is to duke it out in the courts. Don’t do this by executive fiat. But executive fiat is the way Obama prefers to do everything he can’t accomplish through Congress or the courts, or that he can’t accomplish fast enough to suit him. We can expect him to keep on pushing his agenda in this manner until his very last moment in office.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump (at least, in one of his comments) have seemed to favor something similar. Trump’s most recent statement, however, is that he thinks it should be a state issue, which is a rare instance of Trump defending federalism (which would be encouraging—that is, if he actually means it). If you want to read much more on the subject of what this means beyond the particular issue of transgendered children in school bathrooms, read this and this.

Whatever is going on with transgender students psychologically and physically (and we can, and have, argued about that on this blog, because it’s not completely clear) the schools they attend face a very difficult dilemma. Various accommodations have been made by states, or by administrators on a district-by-district or a school-by-school basis, and there have been a number of lawsuits from unhappy students, as well. The issue is working its way through the legal system. Until courts rule otherwise, there’s no reason it couldn’t have been allowed to play out that way—except, of course, that Obama and the left didn’t feel like leaving it that way and saw no reason not to use their muscle to make it happen. Yes, they can; after all, who’s going to stop them?

Charlotte Bronté« and the eccentricity of genius

The New Neo Posted on by

The Bronté« family were all geniuses, probably including brother Branwell who dissipated himself with coke and booze. Why genius ran so rampant in the family has been the subject of countless books, one of which I’m currently reading: Charlotte Bronté«: A Fiery Heart (terrible schmaltzy title, but excellent book) by Claire Harman.

Like many others, I became a Bronté« fan when I was very young and first opened Jane Eyre, which grabbed me from the moment I began to read it and never let go, fostering many subsequent readings. How old was I? Probably around 11 or 12 at the beginning, later on mostly a teenager, and then once again in adulthood. The voice of Jane is one of the most vivid and personal in all of literature, and it’s a bang-up story, too.

Not long after that first reading I plowed through sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights as well, which was much sterner stuff but still hugely fascinating and which bore repeated readings, especially for favorite parts. Later on when I saw the movie starring the achingly young Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff, that didn’t hurt, either.

I never read anything by the youngest sister, Anne, but I did read Charlotte’s other novels, although they didn’t hold a candle to the great Jane Eyre, in my humble (and youthful) opinion. I also read a bunch of biographies of the family, including one dedicated to the decline of Branwell. All of the siblings died in their twenties and thirties, several of tuberculosis, leaving father Patrick to soldier wearily on until his death at 84, forty years after the death of his wife and six years after losing the last of his six children, Charlotte (the two oldest daughters had not survived childhood, dying in a manner somewhat similar to the “Helen Burns” character in Jane Eyre).

What a family. If you know anything about them, you also know that as children they were voluminous writers who created the saga of an imaginary world called Angria, an endeavor that continued well into adulthood and consumed (and helped polish) some of their formidable literary powers. But what I learned from the new biography of Charlotte I’m reading was that the Bronté« sagas were written in handwriting so microscopic as to be almost unreadable, in tiny books that might be more suitable for dollhouses.

Here’s a discussion:

Charlotte and Branwell Bronté« wrote many of their stories of Angria on tiny sheets of paper in nearly microscopic handwriting. This particular example consists of four sheets of notepaper folded into sixteen pages. The individual sheets are approximately 4 ½ inches long and 3 5/8 inches wide, and the entire text contains about nineteen thousand words…

It is unknown why the Bronté« children chose to write their stories in such tiny script, but several suggestions have been made. One is that the children may have been trying to hide their imaginative plays from their stern and religious aunt Elizabeth Branwell, their mother’s sister, who did not encourage their literary pursuits. “Aunt Branwell,” as they called her, seems to have been a somewhat forbidding and authoritarian figure for the children. If secrecy was the motivation, Charlotte and Branwell were probably successful ”“ most people cannot read the manuscript without a magnifying glass. Another possible explanation is that the children wrote to the scale of the toy soldiers that played such an important role in their imaginary world. Their fascination with the miniature may have played a material part in the mythos they developed around the world they called Angria…

However, it may have been that Charlotte and Branwell had simply developed a habit of writing in extreme minuscule. It is known that the Bronté«s produced tiny handwritten books and magazines from an early age…Charlotte’s earliest surviving manuscript is a miniature book she made at the age of ten for her sister Anne. One of Charlotte’s school friends recalled that when she asked about her tiny handwriting, Charlotte responded that she and Branwell had learned to print so small “by writing in their magazine. They brought out a ”˜magazine’ once a month, and wished it to look as much like print as possible.”

In the biography of Charlotte, it mentions that one of her Angrian works comes out to be 84 pages when printed in normal fashion and normal type, whereas in its original version (only several inches by several inches) the entire thing amounted to only 24 pages. That is extraordinary.

But one picture is worth 1,000 words (or 24 pages). This photo shows you the scale, and it gives the word “manuscript” a whole new meaning:
brontemanuscript

Let’s talk VP choices

The New Neo Posted on by

It would take a very special person to accept the VP position under Donald Trump.

First of all, the person has to be able to stomach Donald Trump.

Secondly, the person should be capable of lending at least the appearance of gravitas and experience to the ticket.

Thirdly, all the other usual attributes for a VP would also operate: that is, the need to balance out some of Trump’s demographic characteristics such as age or gender or race.

Fourth, Trump might throw out all of these considerations because he likes to do unusual things and surprise people.

So with all those caveats (particularly the first one), here are the people I think are in the running (in order of probability): Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, Jeff Sessions, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, John Kasich, and a distant Ben Carson and even more distant Sarah Palin. Note that most of those are white men like Trump, and two are even older than Trump (Gingrich and Giuliani), so that balance thing isn’t necessarily going to operate.

The vice presidency usually doesn’t matter all that much. But for Trump as nominee it probably would matter much more than usual, for three reasons. The first is his political and office-holding inexperience. I’m not talking relative inexperience (as with Obama); I’m talking total and complete inexperience. The second is his loose-cannon character; he needs someone to make him appear less unstable. The third is his age. If elected, Trump would be 70 and the oldest president to ever assume office for the first time. His almost-certain opponent Hillary Clinton would have just turned 69 in October, which would make her the second-oldest if she won, slightly younger than Ronald Reagan when he became president for the first time. Bernie Sanders, of course, would be the oldest by several years at 75, and Biden would be 73 on election and 74 by the time of the inauguration.

Talking to Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

Everyone’s conferring with Trump. Paul Ryan, for example.

Makes sense. They want to see what he’ll promise, what they’re willing to give, whether it’s a good idea to support him, and probably much more.

But I wonder if they understand that whatever he promises them he will do or say, whatever deal he makes, is completely mutable at his discretion. I cannot imagine why they would believe him. He contradicts himself daily (for example, now it’s that banning Muslims was just a “suggestion” and he’s not releasing his tax returns till after the election—yeah, right!). To even try to determine which is the truth—what he said yesterday, what he says today, what he will say tomorrow, or something else entirely—is a futile waste of time.

Many Trump supporters would no doubt say that’s what’s so clever about Trump—so wily, so unpredictable!

Campaign 2016: promises, schmomises

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “J.J.” wonders:

How do you account for this? Hillary is on record as being for closing down the coal industry. Trump is on record as saying he will put the miners back to work. Polls today in West Virginia (a coal mining state) show Hillary beating Trump in the general. Are people listening or using their heads? They want a candidate that’s going to close down one of their major industries?

My answer is that some people are not listening. Some people probably haven’t a clue what one or the other candidate said on the subject. I don’t know what percentage of the whole that group is.

There’s another group that is listening, though, and probably even using their heads. My guess is that these West Virginians who are listening and who support Hillary fall into one of two categories. The first group would be composed of people who live in West Virgina who don’t want to protect the coal industry and just don’t care (leftist environmentalists, for example). But the second group could be composed of people who don’t think Donald Trump will keep his word, and therefore discount what he is saying and believe Hillary would help them in other ways. The don’t believe Trump and don’t trust him, so when he says he’ll put the miners back to work they think he’s pandering to him and will forget about them soon enough. Or, some of them may believe he would like to put the miners back to work but that it can’t be accomplished. But my guess is that more of them have simply come to the conclusion that they can’t trust a word Trump says.

If Trump says whatever comes into his mind at the moment—either through pique, or capriciousness, or strategic calculation—and if everything he says is mutable and changeable, merely the opening gambit of a “deal” and not from any core principles of his, then who cares what he says and who would rely on it? If Trump’s promises have no meaning in the usual sense of the word “promise,” then voters would understandably disregard them.

I have practically reached this extreme point with Trump myself. I have stated before that I do think he loves America, but that’s about it for his principles. And even his love of America is a principle he can interpret in a very flexible manner in terms of how he will act. His love for America does not necessarily lead him in any one particular direction, nor does it mean he will keep his word about anything. And I also believe that his love for himself trumps (pun intended) his love for America.

Elections are about a lot of things, and character is one of them.

None of this means I am sure I won’t vote for Trump. I may do so, but if I do so it will be one of the most execrable—perhaps the most execrable—acts of my life. If I do vote for him, it will only be because I have decided that not voting for him would be even worse.